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December 2010 Main Page Mexican-American War Mark II
A big bunch of AH Challenges this time. Soviet-Japanese War in 1939
Comments Section Point Of Divergence is an amateur press magazine and also a forum for discussing AH and AH-related ideas. Here is my comment section. |
This
is part of the first installment of my 2010 NaNoWrite novel where World
War II England gets an ISOT back to the stone age.
It's not much past the rought draft stage. I made
one
quick
edit pass that cut the word count of this by 5.5%. Typically I need to
cut word count by 20% from rough draft. That means that either my
writing has tightened up a lot, or more likely, this passage has about
14.5% more words than it needs. If it feels flabby and slow that would
be why. It’s probably packing about 800 extra words.
(June 18, 1944 shortly after noon) Lloyd Corrigan looked at the map in front of him and then out the cramped navigator’s port of the B24 bomber. He noticed the smell of smoke, blood, and unwashed bodies at some level but pushed them to the back of his mind. The towering clouds ahead of him were the issue, that and being lost over German-held France. "Looks like the thunderstorm from hell," that was the radioman, a new guy. Lloyd thought his name was Jackson or Johnson. "I'm getting nothing on the radio." A fritzing radio didn’t surprise Lloyd, given the damage to the rest of the plane,. The wind ruffled Lloyd’s map though a jagged inch wide hole from a German 20 mm shell. Other holes from similar shells permeated the plane. One of the four engines trailed grey smoke, though the propeller still turned. Lloyd didn't let his mind dwell on silence from the tail gunner and bombardier positions or distant moans from the waist gunner. He concentrated on figuring out their current position more specifically than somewhere over France and directing the pilot back to Mendelsham airbase in Suffolk, southern England. The big bomber labored in spite of an empty bomb bay. Lightning sparked through the clouds ahead of them, startlingly bright. Thunder followed, several seconds later but loud, a sharp crack cutting through the engine noise. The darkness ahead of them clashed with the sunny, nearly cloudless sky above and behind them. "I didn't think they had Midwest type thunderstorms over here." That was the radio man again. “I’m getting nothing from the navigation beams.” Lloyd heard radio static faintly over the plane’s other noises. He breathed a sigh of relief when he spotted the distinctive outline of the small French town of Caen below them, not yet covered by the onrushing clouds. They were still off course, and alone in the sky, limping along on three and a half engines, but at least he knew where they were. He plotted a course from Caen across the channel to Mendelsham, and passed it to the pilot. The plane shifted course and Lloyd let out a deep breath he hadn't realized he was holding. Less than half an hour, then a white knuckle landing and sleep. The plane angled slightly north from straight west. As the storm closed down his view, Lloyd noticed something odd about the French coastline. It shifted as he stared down at it. He glanced at his watch. A little past noon--not a time for high tides, and the storm shouldn’t be whipping up waves yet. The clouds closed in before he could get a good look. Lloyd mentally kicked himself for allowing the southward drift in their course. That put them too close to the front lines of the Normandy beachhead, adding flak from German frontline units to the many other hazards of operating over France in June 1944. The volume of flak over German lines wasn't particularly heavy. June 18th saw the Germans clinging to a collapsing perimeter around the beachhead, with Allied bombing of their transportation network and Free French partisan raids making routine supply of munitions and fuel difficult. German armored columns moved only at night, cowering in thick woods under heavy camouflage during the day, lest they be destroyed by Allied fighter-bombers. A few tracer rounds whipped past them through the thickening clouds before the sky closed in around them, a grey aerial fog, stripping away vision for anything more than a few yards from the airplane. "We need instrument work here," he said. "I'm still getting nothing," the radio guy said. Crossing the English channel, even in a plane slowed by a failing engine, doesn't take long. Lloyd called for the air speed. Once he had that, dead reckoning gave him a pretty good idea of where they should be relative to the airbase. Compass work should keep them on course. Which meant that the airbase should be below them in five minutes—two minutes--now. "Should be right down there. Delivered nice and neat." The radio guy's voice came over the speaking tube. "Nothing from control." The clouds still totally obscured everything below them. The plane lurched from the turbulence, and two quick lightning flashes lit up the clouds around them. "It's down there somewhere." The pilot eventually brought the plane below the cloud cover. Lloyd tried to look everywhere at once for other incoming planes while still looking for the airbase. He also kept an eye open for the little town of Stowmarket, a few miles from the airbase. "We're so fubared when we get down. I'm glad I'm not the pilot or the radio guy." Jackson said, "I can't get it on the radio if they're not sending it, and they're not sending it." Lloyd scanned the ground below them. Wind and rain buffeted the plane. "Nothing." He studied the map, and redid his calculations. "We've got to be close." The terrain below them looked both familiar and wrong. The contours of the land looked right, or close to right, but the usual neat boundaries between farms didn't show up. Lloyd didn't see any roads or houses either. Someone from the back said, "BBC went off half an hour ago." No one questioned that, though personal radios on flights were officially forbidden due to their weight and power drain. "I don't recognize anything down there," Lloyd said. "If we have the gas, circle back to the coast and head up or down until we recognize something, then head back inland." The pilot sounded irritated. "Is that an order, corporal?" "A suggestion, sir." “Find me the airport. We have wounded back there. They may be bleeding to death.” I’ll just point and think real hard and it’ll be there, sir. Lloyd bit back the response. His stomach churned. The plane circled, then headed toward the coast. They were low enough that rain and now hail pinged off the fuselage above them. "We're low enough to see cars and houses, but I don't see any." Lloyd studied his map again, looking for blank spots in the road network big enough to match the emptiness he saw below him. He didn't see any. The ground below them stayed stubbornly traffic and house free, mostly tree-covered. There were still no boundaries between fields. Lloyd caught a glimpse of animals moving down there, but at the distance he couldn't identify them. He spotted a wide belt of dark brown as they approached the coast. It was narrow as a football field some places, a mile or two wide in others. The shape of the coast seemed familiar, but not an exact match with his map. "What's the brown stripe?" Nobody answered. The plane skirted the coast, and Lloyd looked for landmarks--a town, a bay, a river. Nothing in the topography matched exactly, and he saw no towns or roads or cars. "I should be seeing something I can recognized down there. England isn't Kansas. There shouldn't be this many miles of miles and miles." "England shouldn't have elephants either," the radio guy said. "Elephants?" Lloyd peered down at an open area below them. Something big moved down there, but he couldn't make it out. "Probably cows." "I guess." The radio guy sounded doubtful. The pilot said, "If you're done seeing pink elephants I could use directions. We have maybe fifteen minutes of flying time left if you want a soft and tidy landing." "I'm looking," Lloyd said. "Anything on the radio yet?" "Nope. Static and stray signals from Normandy." "Can you home in on that, or the BBC?" "BBC is gone. Off the air or something. I can try to figure out where we are from Normandy. I'm not sure I can be exact enough to do us any good." They struggled to find something familiar as the gas dwindled. Finally, Lloyd said, "Permission to seek a clear and level spot." "This bird won't land in a cornfield without more damage than I want on my record," the pilot said. "Right now I would be happy to find a cornfield. I'm afraid we'll have to make do with worse than that." Lloyd turned back to his map. The coast looked very much like a stretch of his map, but with two differences. The map didn't show the wide brown strip, and it showed an England with flourishing ports, towns and roads. Lloyd saw none of those things below him. Instead he saw mostly unbroken forest, with a few more open areas, not completely treeless but with trees dotting a grassland or savannah. "It's going to be a tough one." The pilot swore. "Anything at all? Any hint of an airport? I'll take one of those little ones for private planes right now." "You can see it as well as I can," Lloyd said. "You have your choice of forest up the tailpipe or dodging between trees to keep them out of your tailpipe." "I'll take the third choice." "There isn't one. Oh wait. There is. The brown stuff. It may be mud though." Lloyd thought about that and something clicked. "Tidal wave! That's what's left over from a tidal wave!" "Mud and debris," the pilot said. "If that's what's down there we don't want any part of it." "Do you have enough fuel left to look for choice number four?" "No." "Then with all due respect sir, the beach looks like the best choice." The plane flew straight and level for a few minutes, or as level as it could in the wind and the pounding rain. Finally it angled down toward the brown stripe. As they got closer, Lloyd saw beach debris--dead fish and clots of sea weed. He couldn't tell how solid the ground below was, but he spotted sharp rocks sticking out of brown, like teeth poised beneath their tires. The wheels finally touched down, and leisurely airspeed suddenly translated into breakneck, jolting groundspeed. The plane bounced along, back-breakingly hard. A particularly sharp bounce sent it back in the air, and when it landed again it dropped almost straight down, leaving Lloyd's stomach in the air. The plane slowed to more ground-appropriate speed, but something in the wheels screeched as though someone was getting their fingernails yanked out. There was a wobbly feel to the ride now, and as the plane slowed, it lurched sideway and one wing was on the ground, grating and turning the plane in a circle. The wing hit something and the plane tilted almost to vertical, then slammed back down, still right side up. Smoke and the smell of burning electronics filled the air. Someone in the front of the plane screamed again and again. Flames popped through a crack in the bulkhead that separated Lloyd from the pilot compartment. He grabbed an extinguisher and fired it through the crack. The flames subsided, then leapt up again. Someone leaned in beside him and added to the spray. Finally the fire died down. Only three of the original nine member crew survived when they finally got out and took stock of the situation. The pilot was burned almost beyond recognition, mercifully dead. The three gunners and the bombardier, had apparently taken wounds back during their bombing run and either died immediately or bled out during their long attempts to find an airport. Lloyd silently hoped their deaths had been immediate and painless. The flight engineer was dead too, his neck snapped. Surprisingly, almost incredibly, the plane wasn’t in bad shape. The copilot said, “I could probably fly it out with new tires, some wiring on the instrument panel, and gas of course.” “And if I had wings and weighed twenty pounds I could fly,” the radioman said. The three of them surveyed the country around them. They stood in a muddy, slippery sand that smelled like dead fish and squished beneath their feet with small sucking sounds. Further up the beach, the brown patch shaded into a more normal looking white sand beach. Inland from the beach, scrub trees gradually coalesced into a forest of majestic elms, with trunks thicker than a man’s height. Animals moved at the edge of the forest and an odd laughing sound reached them. One of the animals moved closer, with an odd hind-quarters down, heads up gait. Lloyd studied the animal and finally said in a subdued voice, "There are no hyenas in England either." *** (June 18, 1944-shortly after noon) Utah beach showed surprisingly little sign of the fierce battle that raged there the first few days of the invasion. No dead soldiers. Few signs of wreckages. A smooth flow of ships behind the breakwaters made of sunken obsolete battleships and cruisers, and the "mulberry" artificial harbor. Corporal Billy Chandler walked ashore at mid-day on June 19, 1944 without getting his shoes wet, without getting shot at, and without getting much attention from anybody except a nurse who gave him an overlong look. You don't see the scars, inside or out. Billy limped only slightly, almost unnoticeably. The limp didn't draw much attention. Too many little wounds from the formidable German defenses, now overcome on the beaches but only bent, not broken and still holding on tenaciously and ingeniously no more than fifteen miles inland. Supplies flowed inland across the beaches and through the artificial harbor, a miracle of Allied ingenuity, a flood that should drown the Nazis if all went well, and if the supplies went where they were supposed to. Which is part of both my jobs. A bored-looking sergeant listened to music at a checkpoint up the beach. The music had an American beat to it, though probably broadcast through the BBC. The sergeant took a long drag at a cigarette, exhaled, and made a point of staring at the smoke ring before finally looking at Billy’s papers and sending him up the beach—seeming to take pleasure in stretching the process out. Billy glanced at his watch impatiently, the minute hand crawling from 12:18 to 12:21 as the sergeant demonstrated his limited but preemptive authority. The music abruptly cut off as Billy headed further up the beach. He glanced back, hoping to see an officer laying into the sergeant at the checkpoint, but the sergeant was alone at his guard shack, fiddling with the radio. Hope it broke. Maybe there is a little justice in the world. Very little. Billy's boots crunched in the sand, and his thick blond hair blew in the wind. The sun reflected off the beach. To the west, over the channel, clouds gathered, whipping across the sky. The wind picked up, and suddenly he felt a brief gust of much warmer wind, five or six degrees warmer at least. The hot air dissipated as quickly as it came. Billy looked around, not sure what he had felt. No one else seemed disturbed, so he decided the breeze wasn't from an incoming artillery shell or bomb. Just a freak of the wind. He glanced back when he heard an outburst of excited talk behind him and saw soldiers pointing at the beach. The waters of the channel were rushing out, exposing an ocean bottom littered with all of the debris of war that he had half expected on the beach--sunken landing craft, the sodden remnants of bodies. Soldiers ran out into the exposed areas, and Billy found himself yelling, "No! Tidal wave!" He remembered that, either from his training or from something his friends had told him years ago. A couple of officers yelled the same thing. A soldier triggered a German mine or unexploded shell in the newly exposed area and filled the air with his screams. Someone touched Billy's arm, and he glanced down at the same nurse who had given him the overlong look, brown haired, full-bodied, not more than five feet tall. She asked, "What's happening?" "Tidal wave coming!" "Are we safe here?" Billy realized he wasn't sure, then that he knew the likely answer. "No! Run!" They crunched their way inland, looking for higher ground. He glanced back and saw the wave coming in. It didn't look high or menacing at first, but it just kept coming in, growing higher and higher. He looked around for something tall to get on. The Quonset huts scattered nearby looked too flimsy. A couple of nearby trees were scarred remnants of their former selves, with bark and branches blown away by nearby shellfire. There was a fork with a skinned and dying branch not more than six feet above the ground on the nearest tree. Billy ran to it, and boosted the nurse to his shoulders, incongruously aware of her body against his and a whiff of perfume. She pulled herself onto the branch, though agonizingly slowly. The ocean swept in at nightmare speed. As soon as the nurse seemed stable, Billy grabbed the branch and pulled his chin up to it. The branch creaked alarmingly as the water surged, too close for him to actually get on the branch, so he swung his legs up and held tight as the water crested and raced past. It touched his back and then covered his face, yanking at him. He held his breath and hugged the branch with his arms and legs. The current reversed, jerking him toward the ocean, then was gone except for mud and puddles filled with flapping fish. Billy glanced up to see if the nurse was okay and caught an eyeful of thigh. The branch creaked again, more alarmingly, and he swung down, but not quickly enough. The branch cracked and fell. The nurse jumped off at the last minute and caromed into him, knocking him into the mud and landing on top of him. The fall knocked the breath out of him and he lay back for a second or two, gasping. "You okay?" A male voice yelled. "Oh yeah, you're fine, lucky dog." Billy sat up as a couple of army guys run past. A short, brown haired guy winked and gave him the thumbs up sign. He glanced at the nurse, laying on top of him with her uniform in disarray. "This probably looks like a lot more fun than it was." She grinned. "Maybe we'll see if we can have as much fun as it looks like we did someday." She extracted herself, smoothed down her uniform and walked away, hips swaying. Billy got up, felt several spots where he figured he would have bruises, and ran to help with the cleanup. He muttered, "I didn't even get her name." The sergeant and his checkpoint hut were gone, and Billy felt a brief surge of inappropriate joy, followed by remorse at it. Both went away when he recognized the sergeant among a group of onlookers. Most of the soldiers were pitching in to help the injured and rescue material. Billy joined a group on a small boat, rescuing soldiers swept into the bay. Billy got a good look at the "mulberry" artificial harbor. It was a twisted and probably irreparable mass. A couple of old warships sunk as breakwaters held up better, though it looked like even their sturdy masses had shifted. The wind picked up, and the seas grew choppy. Storm clouds were rolling in from the west. They rescued one more sailor and raced back to shore. A nearby boat suddenly exploded, sending pieces of the front flying toward them. Someone yelled, "Mines! The wave shook them loose." They beached the boat and threaded their way back inland, carefully looking for any mines the wave might have deposited on the beach. A light tank sat half in and half out of the water. Based on its condition it had probably been lost in the landing, then pushed ashore by the wave. A thunderstorm came in and the group of loosely thrown together men Billy had been working with dispersed to their units. Military chain of command, temporarily disrupted, reasserted itself, leaving Billy isolated. He walked inland, then hitched a ride on a jeep heading to the nearby airbase where he was assigned. He was an unmilitary looking mess when he reached the untidy, temporary looking facility, a collection of Quonset huts, enclosed by barbed wire and with a gravel field hastily scratched out of a farmer’s field in the twelve days since D-Day. He reported to the gate, where a tough, efficient-looking sergeant looked at his soaked and muddy uniform with disapproval as he stood in the rain outside a guard shack with lightning flashing uncomfortably close. The guy finally let him in, and he reported to his unit. Chapter Two Roy Fleming hated Britain. He especially hated the British rain falling outside. Cold drizzle. Bone-chilling wind. And this is June. June 22nd if he had kept track of the days properly. He wasn't sure of that. The alcohol blurred days and nights and brought him to places like this all too often. Brigs. Military prisons. Busted from whatever rank he had. And back to sobriety hard. He had vague uneasy recollections of gunshots, maybe even artillery pounding. He tried to fit that into his picture of what happened the last few days. I need to get somewhere, talk to people. Too much I don’t know. An officer, major according to his bars, stood outside the cell with a small escort. "You look like hell." "Feel like it too." Ray waited a shade too long, deliberately so, before adding, "Sir." He got up and did a proper military salute. The major just looked at him. "Well, you're cocky enough. I doubt if the US army aircorp would miss you much if you happen to get broken in our little quest. But are you smart enough to be useful?" "Dumb as post, sir" And not volunteering for anything. "Bring him." The officer turned and marched away. The enlisted men marched him to an office dominated by a huge desk. The major was already sitting behind the desk. He shuffled paper for a while, then looked up and dismissed all but two of the men. They stood statue-like at the door. "You've been drunk or in jail most of the time since June 18th," the major said. "You shouldn't have any idea what's going on outside in England or anywhere else in the world. If that's true I'll be disappointed. I also won't believe it. Don't try the dumb hillbilly routine. We’ve had an eye on you and looked up your records, going all the way back to when you were a kid playing Indian back at Yamasee Crossing." Ray straightened up. "Yamassee Crossing, huh?" "You made quite an impression back there. I guess that was before you crawled into the bottle and decided not to come out." "So you're taking an interest in me, enough to dig up ancient history. Why?" "We need a certain type of men, guys who won't curl up into a ball when they find out that the world has changed beyond what they could possibly imagine. I wonder if you might be one of them." "Oh, I have quite an imagination." "Yes, it says so in your file. So what has been going on in England the last few days?" "I've been drunk and in the stockade. How would I know?" "And you'll go back to that when we’re done with you. Right now though, you may have a job, one that will offer you the kind of adventure you read about and that you and your 'Indians' played at when you were growing up. We just have to establish that you really are the kind of guy we need." The major offered him a cigarette. Ray shook his head. "I never touch them. Bad for you." “And four day drunks aren’t?” The major laughed. "You didn't answer my question about England." "What do you want me to say, sir?" "What you think has been going on for the last five days. It's vital for your future that you speak frankly and openly now." I should clam up. Be the dumb drunk hillbilly. Roy said, “How about I ask you a question?” “Sure.” “I remember gunshots and then explosions. What were they? Is this an investigation? Am I suspected of having anything to do with whatever happened?” “I thought you would have known that. Maybe you aren’t the kind of person people think you are. I answer your question. You answer mine. Deal?” “Okay.” “It’s no secret. German POWs took advantage of the tidal wave and broke out. They got guns and even a couple of tanks and caused a boatload of problems before we killed or captured most of them.” “Most of them?” “Yes, most of them. As to the rest, we’ll talk about that if we get to the next stage. Now, are you going to keep your end of the bargain?” "Okay." Roy sighed. This is going to turn out to be a mistake, but I never could keep my mouth shut. "Something bad happened at Normandy. The Nazis had something up their sleeves the brass hadn't figured on. A super bomb of some kind, probably. Whatever it was, it slopped ocean up onto the coast along pretty much all of Britain. I can’t get my head around a bomb that big. I can’t figure out why they didn’t drop one on London. Maybe they just had one and they dropped it on Normandy. The ports still aren’t working, but the brass is pretending they are. Supplies aren't really going to Normandy anymore, even though everything is getting picked and sent toward the ports just like normal and the ships are heading in the right direction. I figure the brass is getting ready to let us down easy, cooking up a heroic story. Those guys, all of the British and American soldiers that went over to Normandy, are gone. How many got over there before the wheels fell off the wagon? Half a million? Maybe a few hundred thousand more. Someone screwed up and got them killed. Scapegoats have got to be found, the guilty protected and bystanders picked out to get their butts roasted." "Now that’s not a bad job of guessing, but it’s just a little disappointing after everything I've heard about you. The guy who can figure it out. Isn’t what you told me just what the scuttlebutt says?" "Like I said, I have been drunk or in jail. Some of it people know, but they don’t usually put it all together. Planes take off just like normal but they don't use enough fuel or enough bombs to be doing what people figure they should be doing. Pilots don't say much but they look grim when they get back. Ammo goes out and comes back, too close to the same amounts. People down in the ranks figure things out, pieces of it. And before I blacked out the rumors were flying thicker and faster than I’ve ever heard them. If you have any pull on what people get told, you’ll want to tell them something solid and true yesterday or the day before. Either the Germans surrendered or they tore us a new hole somewhere, and I’m betting on the new hole." "There is another explanation," the major said. "It heads down a rabbit hole you can never come back from. When I hit you with it, I think you’ll understand why we haven’t said much officially yet." The major got up and paced silently. Finally he pulled down a map of Britain modified with a light blue strip along the coast. "This is Britain with the sea twenty-five feet higher than it's ever been in human history. Lots of town and harbors are covered with water. Salt water is backed up into the mouths of rivers. A lot of people died and a lot of human lives turned to crap in that light blue stretch." Ray looked at the map, puzzled. "I heard there was a tidal wave, and I just told you I figured that might have been from whatever the Germans used at Normandy. There was talk of atomic power before the war among the big brains. Did the Germans get their hands on that?" The major shook his head. "What happened, if the Germans did it, gives them enough power that the biggest bomb you can imagine looks like a sparkler in a little girl's fist." "So what did happen? I've got buddies over there." "Oh yes, the other two 'Indians' from Yamassee Crossing. That's probably what set off this particular bout of crawling into a bottle. You figure they're dead or in a German POW camp." "Are they?" "I have no idea. Now here is your chance to redeem yourself. What would happen to the guys on the Normandy beaches if nothing from Britain could get to them? No planes, no ships, no radio signals.” “They would be out of luck as soon as they ran out of food and ammunition. It might take a month or a little longer. Wait a minute though, could stuff still come in from the US or from Italy?” “Yep.” “It would be touch and go, but they would have a chance. We would bring supplies up from Italy and directly from the US. It wouldn’t be enough at first, and it would probably take two weeks to get the first batch of supplies there—though we could reroute stuff that was headed for Britain and the Soviets. We could fly bombers one way directly to fields in France and use aircraft carriers to ferry in fighters. We could put the Pacific war on low burn and bring as many carriers and landing craft as we need to pound the Germans and keep them off our boys in the meantime. So are you telling me that the British ports got hit that bad?” “They’re mostly under water.” “What’s stopping planes from flying over there?” “Now that’s what I’m after. Thinking. Seeing the big picture. Figuring it out. So now we go down the rabbit hole. Britain, and I mean the whole main island plus most of the little ones around it, has had no communication with the outside world with the possible exception of a few garbled messages that may be from the Soviet Union, since around noon on June 18th. No radio messages from the US or France or Germany. No Atlantic cables. No incoming ships that were not already within ten miles of the coast. We have no idea what happened to our boys at Normandy because we can't reach them."
Posted on Jan 3, 2012.
More Stuff For POD Members Only What you see here is a truncated on-line version of a larger zine that I contribute to POD, the alternate history APA. POD members get to look forward to more fun stuff.
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